Breakdown of Miksi sinä nielaisit sellaisen chilin?
sinä
you
miksi
why
sellainen
such, that kind of
chili
chili
Questions & Answers about Miksi sinä nielaisit sellaisen chilin?
Why does the word sellainen change to sellaisen here?
Words ending in -nen change their ending to -se- before adding case endings. Here, the genitive/accusative -n is added to make it sellaisen. Because demonstrative adjectives like sellainen must perfectly match the case of the noun they describe, it takes the same -n ending as chilin.
Why are both sellaisen and chilin in the genitive-accusative case rather than the partitive?
They form the total object of the sentence. Because swallowing the chili is a completed action that affects the entire object, Finnish uses the -n ending instead of the partitive case. The action was finished and the person swallowed the whole chili, not just an undefined part of it.
If I wanted to say 'Why did you swallow THIS kind of chili?', how would the sentence change?
You would swap sellaisen for tällaisen. The word tällainen refers to something close to the speaker (this kind of), while sellainen refers to something further away, previously mentioned, or just 'that kind of' in a general sense. Because it is the object of the sentence, it would still take the -n ending.
I already learned the verb niellä for 'to swallow'. What is the difference with nielaista used here?
Nielaisit is the past tense of nielaista. This is a momentary verb derived from niellä. At the B1 level, you will start noticing that adding the suffix -aista or -äistä to a verb stem changes its meaning to a quick, sudden, or single action. It emphasizes that it was one quick gulp.